tood for a long time, his eyes fixed on the horizon.
"Goodbye, friends!" he suddenly exclaimed, and left us.

At the hour when I usually went downstairs to find out what there was
for dinner, its preparation would already have begun, and Francoise,
a colonel with all the forces of nature for her subalterns, as in the
fairy-tales where giants hire themselves out as scullions, would be
stirring the coals, putting the potatoes to steam, and, at the right
moment, finishing over the fire those culinary masterpieces which had
been first got ready in some of the great array of vessels, triumphs of
the potter's craft, which ranged from tubs and boilers and cauldrons
and fish kettles down to jars for game, moulds for pastry, and tiny
pannikins for cream, and included an entire collection of pots and
pans of every shape and size. I would stop by the table, where the
kitchen-maid had shelled them, to inspect the platoons of peas, drawn up
in ranks and numbered, like little green marbles, ready for a game; but
what fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine
and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and
azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white
feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a
rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these
celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had
been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which
covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this
radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening
shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all
night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played
(lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's
_Dream_) at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic
perfume.

Poor Giotto's Charity, as Swann had named her, charged by Francoise with
the task of preparing them for the table, would have them lying beside
her in a basket; sitting with a mournful air, as though all the sorrows
of the world were heaped upon her; and the light crowns of azure which
capped the asparagus shoots above their pink jackets would be finely and
separately outlined, star by star, as in Giotto's fresco are the flowers
banded about the brows, or patterning the basket of his Virtue at Padua.
And, meanwhile, Francoise would be turning on